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Sergey Brin and Larry Page are both passionate entrepreneurs and
engineers, pushing projects they believe in, with wholehearted
gusto. With Larry replacing Eric Schmidt as the CEO, he’s been
pushing certain areas of growth. Given Larry’s history, many are
expecting him to achieve the impossible, like the Google Books
project, which was his personal goal for years.

Larry (and Google’s) ongoing passion is social networking. And
he’s going at it Larry Page style, with tremendous zeal. Page is
said to have sent a confidential memo to all those involved, that
25% of their annual bonus will depend on how their 2011 Social
Networking strategy performs. This does not absolve other
employees, as they have been asked to chip-in by pushing their
social networking platforms among friends and family. Most
employees, whether directly involved or not, have been asked to
test and get feedback on these platforms.

The Zuckerberg Effect

Google has repeatedly said that Facebook is not their
competition, despite the fact that most of Facebook’s important
employees have been poached from Google. Could Zuckerberg be
sending shivers down Google’s spine? Well, from the frenzy of
social networking tests and activities in the Google office, it
certainly seems so.

Google didn’t exactly miss the bus on social networking. They
tried to buy Friendster but when they failed to do so, they
encouraged their employees to work in this area. As part of the
famed 20% independent project time, where Google engineers work
on their pet projects that’s not part of their main work, Turkish
engineer, Orkut Büyükkökten, created Orkut.

In fact, Google launched Orkut a month before Facebook, and in a
much bigger way, while Mark had just got ‘The Facebook’ going
from his dormitory. Losing the top social networking spot is now
proving to be more than just an ego dent for Google, as Facebook
has become a part of people’s everyday lives and is raking in
millions of dollars.

Turns out, Google’s future success could depend, not on its
search engine or email, but on social networking. Sounds a bit
farfetched? Well, Google doesn’t think so.

The Google Ship

Outwardly, Google’s Ex-CEO, now Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt,
simply changed the conversation when Facebook was mentioned, by
saying that the search engine Bing is a bigger threat. But those
on the inside say that the truth is a bit different.

It is rumored that in 2010, senior vice president of operations,
Urs Hölzle, sent out an email to many of the employees about
something he called, ‘Project Emerald’. The memo basically
communicated approaching social networking with a sense of
urgency and importance.

To demonstrate this visually, Project Emerald Sea had a ship
being knocked over by waves, with the ship representing Google
and the waves, presumably, social networking.

Despite what it claims, this is how important Google considers
its social networking strategy for 2011.

Project Emerald developed into Google’s latest ‘social search
service’ called +1 that was launched on April 6th this year. What
+1 does is help users rank search pages and lets the members in
their circle view these rankings, a Google profile, is required
to become a user, contacts could be built through Gmail and other
Google services. ‘The Social Circle and Content’ tab will help
users view the results of friends and family, get recommendations
and so on. While this definitely brings in a social element in
Search, is it anything like Social Networking?

Critics are not very impressed, as they see nothing new here.
Some have said, rather scathingly, that Google +1 has minuses!

Minus Social Strategy

Undoubtedly, Google does not lack the technical prowess needed to
create a brilliant social networking platform. Just look at the
astounding number of technical battles it has won, from bringing
the daily news from the whole world on one web page through
Google News to scanning most of the world’s books through Google
Books, or turning internet TV on its head with YouTube, but it’s
Achilles Heel is turning out to be Social Networking.

Experts believe the reason for Google’s failure to launch, in a
manner of speaking in this sphere, is due to massive strategic
missteps. Unlike its other projects, when it comes to social
networking, Google has been inline but not really ahead of time.
Although, it has shown tremendous faith in the area by fuelling
internal projects and acquiring social platforms like Social Deck
and Angstrom.

Increasingly, readers are discovering new pages through links
spread on social networks, it would be hard to say how these
Networks can replace Google’s major driver – the search engine.
But Google has always been ahead of it’s time and given that it
considers Social Networking to be such a big competition, it is
possible, that in some way, these networks could make stand-alone
Search obsolete.

Steven Levy, one of the most respected technology writers and the
senior writer at Wired, has spent the last three years studying
Google and its strategy, during this time, Google has been
constantly conceptualizing and changing its social strategy.
Steven has called Google’s approach to social networking, ‘a
comedy of errors’.

Although, there’s nothing comical in this for users, who have
always benefited from Google’s projects, be it blogging, search,
map, news or reader. And it’s really hard to root for the
underdog here, Facebook, given Zuckerberg’s popular perception.
Isn’t it?